I've had water cooling before but with the CPUs of late heat isn't the big issue so.... What I'm curious is to what extreme are you willing to go to get your systems 2-3 degrees cooler than a high quality air cooler? Some say noise yada yada BS! lol You have just as many fans running on your system whether it's air cooled or water cooled.

As much as I'd LOVE to invest $400 into a nice half decent H2O setup with my CPU it just isn't worth it. A $70 heat sink will do the trick just fine with the same out come & viola I'm in money that I can put into other upgrades.

Don't get me wrong I'm dying to build a sweet system with custom water cooling but damn I dunno? I even have it all picked out along with the best air cooler I can get & the money difference is just over whelming.

For me it's not about noise levels, it's about being able to squeeze every last bit out of a processor.

The new(er) intel chips might prove different, but I've found even high quality air tends to run out of steam just as I'm getting to that next level. Folks who do extreme cooling beyond WC will say the same thing about why they chose it over water.

I'm sure I'd have never been able to run my Q6600 at 3.8G stable on air, but if pressed will admit that I probably could have survived with the 3.6G I'd have been able to get on air. It's not about "needing" WC, it's about WC allowing me to push the limit just a little bit higher (not that much) than I could with air.

I don't understand what is your question? If I can interpretate, I believe that your asking why people use watercooling. My answer to you is that it isn't just 2-3 degrees cooler. Maybe with a watercooling system, but not with an awesome system. The CPU can be clocked about .2-1GHZ faster and the GPU can basically be on steroids. Air on the other side needs fans for the CPU heatsink and the GPU heatsink, which in turn causes noise.

As for me, I'm going with WC because of the noise yada yada BS as you say...
I bit the bullet last week and bought a pretty penny (+/- 475$) in parts to build it...But my system will be much more quiet because I will eliminate all the whinny fans for some (8) nice 120mm, that will be controlled by a CrystalFontz 635.
I'm running a Zalman 9700NT + the 8800GTX fan + the 680i NB fan + several case fans and it's extremely annoying when everything kick into high gear!

I bought a CoolerMaster Cosmos 1000 recently to combat the noise but running OC on air is virtually impossible to do in that case if you want to keep decent temps.... On top of that my Raptors were cooking in there, but that a different story altogether (I smell another case mod here)....That case btw is replacing an Antec 900 that was great at cooling but LOUD!!!! Anyway.. I'm still looking at the perfect balance of OC and noise control... Hope to have it with the new setup once it gets here...

It depends entirely on how hard you're pushing your system. Up to a certain point, air cooling is probably a better choice, since its both simpler and up to the task. But beyond a certain point, air cooling simply chokes, requiring the move to stronger cooling methods (i.e. water).

IMO, watercooling doesn't let you get rid of fans, it simply makes each fan more effective. The combination of water's superior thermal characteristics, combined with the ability to spread the heat dissipation out over a larger area (double, triple radiator, etc), makes it very easy to run the same fans at a significantly lower speed. But those advantages usually don't amount to much at stock/milder OC's.

Case in point: My secondary rig is a Q6600 at 3.2 GHz on air, and the "noisiest" thing in the entire system is a Noctua fan at only 1100 rpm. Even a little DB-1 water pump is louder than this system. Obviously, water-cooling would be largely pointless in this instance. BUT the system is basically at threshold temperatures - if I want it any faster, I have to either start using much stronger fans, or switch to another cooling method. At that point, water-cooling becomes an option to consider.

That said, at higher levels, the difference can be far beyond 2-3 degrees. For a hot system, 10 or 15 degrees difference is entirely possible.

I bought my system because A the Zalman 9700 cooler was too loud and my room gets wayyyy to hot with my computer and i believe water cooling will keep not only the noise but the temps down and i like projects i will be spending close to 400 dollars and im hoping i can squeeze more outta my Amd X2 4200 cpu.

The water cooling will actually be dumping more heat since it is taking the heat from the processor (and anything else you cool) more effectively. So the processor will be cooler, but the air coming out of the radiator will actually be hotter than just a regular heatsink (not by a huge amount though).

The only way to lower the heatdunp would be to lower your overclocks (or underclock) which is what the MAD Cool & Quiet does as well as that Intel thingy.